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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435012">The Night's Bride</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M'>Miss_M</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Castlevania (Cartoon)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Couple Getting Married Is Scandalous to Polite Society, F/M, Human/Vampire Relationship, Marriage, Marriage Mistaken For Sexual Slavery By Outsider, Nobody Believes They Married For Love</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:54:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,639</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435012</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“No vampire has ever married a human before, have they? They must all be confounded by your choice of spouse.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>76</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Just Married Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Night's Bride</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/gifts">girlsarewolves</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I own nothing.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Lisa worked the last jeweled hairpin – gold alloyed with copped, without so much as a trace of silver – free of her hair and massaged her scalp with her fingertips, grateful for the weight of her hair falling down her back instead of having to carry it piled up on top of her head. </p><p>“Your friends seemed…” </p><p>She searched for the right word; she’d started this quest early in the evening, and had discovered no phrase more satisfactory than: “Very interesting.” </p><p>Dracula finished manipulating the levers which operated the tiny, hidden sluices built into the doorjambs at the entrance to their bedchamber, transforming the grooved threshold into a shallow stone trough through which water flowed continuously, emerging out of the left-hand doorjamb and flowing into the right-hand one, then circling back through cunningly hidden pipes – an artificial yet effective prophylactic against unwanted visits by creatures which shunned running water. Lisa did not share the amused thought that the little stream shut her husband in with her just as well as it shut the other vampires out of their private apartment. <em>I have you now, my pretty</em>, Lisa thought, her inner voice a sonorous parody of her husband’s usual tone, and suppressed a laugh.</p><p>“They are not my friends,” Dracula said, a trifle testily, Lisa thought, over the murmur of running water.</p><p>“Well, they are not your family, nor your vassals.” Lisa shrugged as she deposited the hairpins in a porcelain dish on her dusty dressing table – she rarely had cause to gaze at herself in mirrors or to worry about her appearance, but she’d had to make an effort for what had passed for her own wedding feast. “‘Friends’ is the only remaining option when it comes to people to whom one feels obliged to present one’s spouse.”</p><p>During the evening’s festivities – if that wasn’t too cheerful a word for the gathering of elder vampires in the great hall – Dracula had made the castle move. Only a little, a few hundred feet, but the whole structure had shuddered, ancient stones creaking and ancient vampires cursing over their lost footholds and chipped dignity. Lisa smiled at the memory – although their guests were his kind, Dracula had not enjoyed the evening any more than she had.</p><p>Dracula’s boots whispered on the stone floor behind her. He could move without sound, of course, but he could also be thoughtful – thus Lisa was not startled when he laid his hands on her shoulders and she felt the great bulk of him at her back, though only her own face looked back at her from the mirror on her dressing table.</p><p>“All vampires are at perpetual war with each other, and all vampires pretend it isn’t so,” her husband explained. “You saw how they all jockey for position and preen when my eye falls upon them, like reptiles in the sun.”</p><p>A thrill ran down Lisa’s spine at his voice in her ear; though she’d never admitted as much to him, Dracula’s voice had been the first thing about him she’d liked as a woman and not just as a doctor and a seeker of knowledge. </p><p>“No vampire has ever married a human before, have they?” she asked, letting her curiosity off its leash as a way to reestablish balance in her heart and in her mind, after the tense and treacherous currents she’d navigated that evening. “They must all be confounded by your choice of spouse.”</p><p>Dracula was a boulder behind her: icy and still. “If any of them were discourteous to you, I shall hang them from the battlements by their bowels.”</p><p>A dark wave of recent memories flooded Lisa’s mind. No one had been discourteous to her face, no. But she had heard words whispered behind her back, and no matter how quickly she turned, she could never catch the speaker in the act. <em>A pet. Cattle. A little morsel.</em> She’d heard mocking laughter, and feral hissing, and the clink of blood-filled cups of Venetian glass when she’d tripped on an uneven flagstone in the great hall and nearly ripped the hem of her velvet dress. A dozen whispered variations on the theme of <em>What on earth was he thinking?</em> had dogged Lisa’s steps as she played hostess, making the rounds to greet and introduce herself to her husband’s kind, all of them looking down at her from their superior height with the yellow eyes of a cat considering a crippled mouse. </p><p>A human – clumsy, ignorant, short-lived, surrounded by predators.</p><p>One of them – her own husband. </p><p>Lisa took a deep breath and said, because she knew better than to lie outright: “No one was discourteous. That lady from Styria… She asked me if my high collar was intended to hide the bruising on my throat.”</p><p>Dracula’s long, pointy fingernails pierced through the velvet covering Lisa’s shoulders and grazed her skin. He tempered his strength with her, but it would have been unreasonable to expect him to change his nature entirely. </p><p>“And what did you tell her?” Dracula asked while Lisa suppressed a wince and made no noise, lest he thought he’d truly harmed her. </p><p>“I told her that high collars were all the rage among the fashionable ladies of Lupu. I don’t think she knew where Lupu was, or that it’s but a mud-caked hamlet on the road to Târgu Mureş.” Lisa pulled away from her husband’s grasp, and Dracula let her. She turned around and smiled up at him. “Perhaps she will return to Styria and convince all the vampire ladies to adopt Lupu fashions.”</p><p>Dracula bent over her, like the night itself enfolding her in its embrace, and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, his long nails brushing Lisa’s lips and the vulnerable underside of her chin, drawing no blood. She thrilled again at the potentialities there. </p><p>“And what else did Carmilla have to say?” Dracula said, a low and honeyed rumble. “That one never passes up the chance to have her fun at the expense of those who are weaker than herself.”</p><p>Lisa stood still and imagined herself huge, icy, an immortal boulder in her own right. She looked her husband in the eye, and her voice did not waver. “She asked me if my bruises were elsewhere than my throat. She wondered out loud whether you’d torn me apart already, <em>there</em>, under my skirts, or you were trying to make me last.”</p><p>Lisa had heard, or rather overheard, much the same, put even more crudely and much more descriptively, from the foul-smelling Viking as well as half a dozen others – dark words lapping at her heels, twining about her like snakes which would choke her. She reasoned that, having shared the essential truth with Dracula, she could keep its variations to herself. </p><p>Dracula let go of Lisa’s chin and took her by the arms gently, though she could see the tension in him, like a seam of fire running from his head, across his shoulders, and down his arms to his powerful hands. “One word from you, and I’ll send Carmilla’s heart back to Styria in a silver box. Would that please you?”</p><p>Lisa shook her head. “I can see how that might be appealing, but no. Leave her be. She was only being true to her nature.”</p><p>Dracula smiled, though Lisa could still see the shadow of murder, vengeance, honor bought with blood, in his eyes. He undid the top button on her high collar as he spoke: “I thought you believed in changing one’s essential nature. Isn’t that why you married me?”</p><p>Lisa cocked an eyebrow at him while he undid the second button. “Surely that’s better than my initial motive, which was to marry you so that I would have unfettered access to your library.”</p><p>Dracula’s fingers paused, the third mother-of-pearl button halfway through its embroidered hole. The danger he carried with him always thickened in the air around them, but he knew his wife better than to think her capable of cruelty. </p><p>The third button slipped free, and Dracula tugged at the collar of Lisa’s dress so that her throat and the top of her shoulder were exposed to the cold predawn air. </p><p>“You haven’t learned everything there is to know yet, wife,” Dracula whispered, brushing Lisa’s hair aside with the tips of his nails, before the very tip of his tongue touched the pulse point on Lisa’s bare neck. </p><p>His tongue, not his fangs. Dracula tempered himself in more ways than one when it came to Lisa, and had not yet bitten her, but they both knew that <em>that</em> possibility was always there. </p><p>Lisa’s eyes drifted shut as she inclined her head, offering up her throat and her bare shoulder, and whispered: “More. Please, more.”</p><p>Dracula made a soft noise which trapped Lisa’s breath in her throat in a sudden, involuntary rush of fear. His kiss on the vulnerable spot in the dip of her collarbone, where her neck met her shoulder, was close-mouthed, but she could feel the sharp teeth sheathed behind his lips. Teeth like scimitars. Sometimes, while she clung to him and he writhed above her in their marital bed, all his teeth would be bared to her in his ecstasy, and in those moments, Lisa never knew which emotion prevailed in her: sheer terror or thwarted desire. </p><p>While her husband kissed her throat and continued to undo the buttons on her dress, Lisa allowed the thrill of it – both the terrible potential and the feverish frustration of it – to envelop her and the whole ghastly evening to slip away from her. She shrugged her loosened dress down her torso, pulled her arms out of the tight sleeves, and threw her whole being into her husband’s embrace, while water gurgled just outside their chamber door and the presence of a castleful of vampires bothered her not at all.</p>
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